The Politics of Division: Legal and Knowledge Regimes
5 and 6 February 2026 College of Fellows | Seminar Room
Co-organized by the College of Fellows and the Platform Global Encounters Online participation is still possible, please register at: global-encounters@uni-tuebingen.de
The politics of division is increasingly taking hold in our societies, both in established and relatively new democracies. It exploits existing and newly created social divisions and cleavages, deploying them to consolidate power and maintain the status quo. Examples include changing varieties of ethnonationalism based on exclusive citizenship. Likewise, gender and sexuality politics have become sites of hostility, everyday policing, and legal repression. The politics of division is further intensified by overlapping crises like climate change, migration, the intrusive state, neoliberalism, and right-wing populism. The two-day conference “Global Encounters: Politics of Division” at the University of Tübingen, hosted by the College of Fellows and the Global Encounters Platform on February 5–6, 2026, brings together academics, researchers, policymakers, activists, and professionals to explore interdisciplinary approaches to the politics of division. Paper presentations interrogate the interplay between law, policy, and knowledge, examining how norms are institutionalized, authorized, and legitimized through legal and knowledge regimes. The conference explores how differences are reinforced by regimes through laws and histories, how anti-democracy gains appeal through rhetoric, and how resistance and restorative justice can be effective responses.
With a keynote by Prof. Peter van der Veer (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity): “Rooted and Uprooted: Suffering and Agency in the Story of the Nation ” (5 February 2025, 6:30 pm, University of Tübingen, Alte Aula)
Nationalism derives its emotive power from its embodiment. Almost everything depends on the arbitrary process of natural reproduction in a particular body, in a particular national territory. Without the birthright to a privileged nation, one has to cross borders and survive incredible hardship and discrimination to attain those privileges. In this talk, I want to address the rooted national body first and then go on to discuss the uprooted body of the outsider, the refugee and the rebel. Both the rooted and the uprooted body are sites of suffering. First, the national body. The nation is sovereign in its territory that has to be defended at all costs, including warfare. The nation’s biography is largely a series of territorial events that have either threatened its sovereignty or established it. The constant re-working of this narrative (with its cast of villains and victims) acquires an almost collective Freudian dimension. Those who win are rooted; those who lose are uprooted. Many of the losing party leave the country and become refugees. The fiction of national borders and the rootedness of those who belong to it creates the related fiction of the uprootedness and ultimate non-belonging of those who have fled. This dual fantasy is constantly reworked and elaborated as a cause of suffering for both those who belong and those who do not.
